In 1974, Loftus and Palmer showed 150 participants a film of a traffic accident. Immediately afterwards, they gave them a questionnaire, containing a load of dummy questions and one question of interest. One group was asked “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”, while another group was asked “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?” (emphasis added). 1 week later they were all asked if they remembered seeing any broken glass in the video. Significantly more people in the “smash” condition answered “yes”. This article discusses some of the implications of this for UX research.

In the comments of this article there were some really good suggestions for how to improve The Times’s paywall. Just two weeks later, they updated their paywall UI, making it match some of the suggestions put forward. Just a coincidence? Maybe. Since then, they’ve barely changed the paywall at all, which is rather shortsighted of them given that they’ve put all their eggs in that basket.

It’s unnerving to see that one of the levels from Call of Duty MW2 is based on real-life footage from an AC130 carrying out an attack in Afghanistan – seriously bad taste. Then, when you consider the fact that modified Xbox controllers are now used in the military to control real-life UAVs, the whole thing starts to feel kind of surreal.

The new Sony / Google TV product announced in October 2010 looks, quite hilariously, like a parody from The Onion (pictured). This was also the only time I’ve ever beat John Gruber off-the-bat, who (coincidentally) published an almost identical article three days later.

I’ve noticed that most people want to be given a binary answer about eye tracking – is it good, or is it rubbish? The reality isn’t so simple, but it’s an indisputable fact that eye tracking is often misunderstood, misused and abused. This presentation explains 5 common misconceptions about eye tracking.